The invention is directed to a device for extracting frozen particles from a gas flow stream. More particularly, a device for trapping, melting, and removing ice particles from a cryogenically cooled air flow stream is detailed. The device is equally useful in extracting frozen substituents from a super-cooled or cryogenic gaseous flow stream.
Certain air conditioning systems and gas conditioning and purification systems have as a requirement the extraction of substantially all moisture in various forms from a relatively high velocity flow stream of super-cooled or cryogenically cooled air or gas. One method of simultaneously cooling and removing a substantial percentage of the entrained moisture is to provide a pair of heat exchanger devices which are alternately cycled into and out of the flow stream such that one of the heat exchanger devices cools the flow stream and allows freezing of entrained moisture on the surfaces of the heat exchanger while the second heat exchanger is heated to melt the accumulated ice to form a liquid which is then removed. While this type of arrangement is generally successful for removing a large percentage of the moisture from the gas flow stream, one hundred percent removal is not practical.
When the gas flow stream is cooled to extremely low temperatures, any remaining moisture freezes into very small ice particles. In a high velocity flow stream, these small, low mass particles are extremely difficult to collect and remove. In addition, high flow stream velocities also tend to cause chunks of the ice which has frozen within the heat exchanger to break loose and enter the flow stream. These ice chunks must also be removed from the flow stream.
For applications requiring very high purity of the resulting cooled air or gas flow stream, all of the ice particles remaining downstream of the heat exchanger devices must be removed. When the applications also require high flow velocities coupled with minimum pressure loss tolerance in a compact space, particle separators of the prior art are unsatisfactory. Accordingly, a new, compact, frozen particle separator for high flow velocity, low pressure loss applications is desirable.